Sublime

Papa was to have gone that noon, during his lunch hour, to the office of the Home Owners’ Loan. If he had not succeeded in getting another extension, they would be leaving this house in which they had lived for more than fourteen years. There was little hope. The Home Owners’ Loan was hard. They sat, making their plans. “We’ll be moving into a nice

Quite apart from her grief, Hazel was torn in half by loyalty to her marriage vows on the one hand, and by a vengeful resentment, a lack of respect for him, on the other; she would leave him if she had the courage, if she didn’t feel that search for happiness on earth must be immoral. He would leave her too, as perhaps Andy might leave Leslie, but

“Sometimes I feel like you’re my twin,” he told her once, “and every time you say something particularly awful—even when I’m not there—I feel a sharp pain in my groin.”

No details to catch in the crevices of her mind.

She had, he thought, one of the world’s great laughs. The kind of laugh where a person didn’t feel that he was being laughed at. The kind of laugh that was an invitation: I cordially invite you to join in this matter that I find amusing.

There was such a plainness about her, as if she’d already shrugged off all human concerns.

“It had been her fortune to possess a finer mind than most of the persons among whom her lot was cast; to have a larger perception of surrounding facts and to care for knowledge that was tinged with the unfamiliar. It is true that among her contemporaries she passed for a young women of extraordinary profundity. She had a theory that one should be

Dad compared himself and Lenny with Gerald and Sara Murphy, socialites who entertained the great artists of the Lost Generation on the French Riviera, and on whom Fitzgerald based Nicole and Dick Diver in Tender Is the Night.

something unsuspected within her, some instinct, made her call him back when he started to go out the door, made her speak quickly and desperately, as she had never spoken before, and as she would never speak again.